New Products

The solutions growing up around the Asterisk telephony engine and toolkit
are plentiful. One of the latest is The Amanda Company's Vdex-40, reputed
to be the first embedded Asterisk-based system to enhance voice quality.
The secret, according to the company, is “the inclusion of multiple
microprocessors as well as DSPs”. The Vdex-40 ships with 16 G.711,
G.723.1, G.726 and G.729a/b voice codecs (a mix of 16 concurrent codecs),
hardware-based G.168 echo cancellation and four built-in telecom line
ports. Amanda also touts the Vdex-40's elimination of moving parts, such
as fans and hard drives, which further improves the product's reliability.
Despite its technological advancements, the Vdex-40 is intended to be
an affordable, Internet-enabled telephone system for the needs of the
small office/home office market.

The goal of the British firm SIMPOL is to simplify cross-platform
software development, which has been advanced recently with two new
products: the SIMPOL Developer Kit and SIMPOL Desktop. First, the SIMPOL
Developer Kit, using the SIMPOL programming language with redistributable
libraries, provides the components necessary for creating applications
of many types, such as desktop, Web server and standalone server.
Future releases will support application development for Mac OS X,
Windows CE and SymbianOS. Second, the SIMPOL Desktop, which works with
the Developer Kit, is a lightweight end-user database product that
enables users to build data-rich applications without programming and
to modify sample applications. One can create an application based on
database tables, forms and reports. Applications can be deployed by
writing them as extensions to SIMPOL Desktop rather than re-inventing
all the functionality over again.

If you are managing high-volume Web infrastructures, check out the new
version 3.2 of Hyperic HQ from Hyperic, Inc. HQ's value proposition is
an open-source solution offering “hands-free monitoring and management
for Web-scale systems”. HQ supplies performance and event data, product
coverage and the functionality operations teams need to discover, diagnose
and deliver a solution in a single tool. Version 3.2 adds features, such
as cross-platform diagnostic tools, Nagios support and MySQL support with
up to 1.5 million transactions per minute. Hyperic also counts CNET
as one of its customers. Linux support includes Red Hat and Fedora.
The standard edition and a three-device trial enterprise edition of
Hyperic HQ are available at Hyperic's Web site.

Keeping track of the licensing conditions of the complete source code of
an open-source project can be a pain. Such pain stimulated HP's FOSSology
Project, a tool that quickly and accurately describes how a given open-source project is licensed. FOSSology analyzes all the source code
for a given project and reports all the licenses being used, “based
on the license declarations and tell-tale phrases that identify software
licensing”, says HP. The goal of FOSSology, which literally means
“the
study of FOSS”, is twofold. First, HP seeks to allow IT organizations
to adopt open-source software confidently, as well as to uncover what
open-source software is being used within their environments. Second,
HP seeks to support open-source developers and distributors to create a
clear licensing picture of the projects and packages they produce. The
tool is available to all in order to promote a more vibrant, open
community of open-source users and contributors.

Developers of embedded systems are typically faced with the challenge that
every new controller needs a separate debugging or programming adapter.
These often either are not available or disappointing on the Linux
platform. To the rescue is Embedded Products' USBprog, a free, universal
programming adapter with a bootloader and tools that allow one to
change the adapter's functionality via open-source software easily. Users can
install different firmware versions from an ever-growing on-line pool
over USB. The adapter can be used for programming and debugging AVR and
ARM processors, as a USB-to-RS232 converter, as a JTAG interface or as
a simple I/O interface.

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